Gamers spend way too much time indoors. And why is that? Because our gaming systems have screens that can’t be viewed outside! Yes, sometimes you see a gamer hunched over their super-reflective mobile phone screen, squinting and trying to make out what the hell is going on, playing a game in the park. It might work if they’re sitting in the shade of a tree, but it’s a very bad gaming experience in broad sunlight.

Owning all those Game Boy iterations, I tried thinking of an excuse to avoid being outdoors and couldn’t, so I decided to work this the other way and actually go somewhere. Just take the first road I find and walk until I’m bored, but at least for an hour, then play some Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins.

Holy people, in religions, have it easy sometimes. In some they need to really work just one day a week, they have obedient little children doing most of the heavy lifting for them during service, and if they misbehave (or behave very well) they get sent to another part of the world for free and can explore that culture.

But Buddhism isn’t a religion, it has no rich organization overseeing things and no strict hierarchies. People in Buddhism, whether holy or not, should be working all the time. “Holy man” is also a shitty translation. What the Buddhist texts mean is “brahman”, in its original sense as used in India.

A brahman, be it woman or man, is highly accomplished in inner purity and self-control. Truly better than most. This isn’t something that you can simply learn in a Catholic priest seminary and then hang on your wall in the form of a certificate of ordination. This is something you work on for years, decades, maybe all your life without even attaining it.

So let’s hear about these interesting qualities in this twenty-sixth and final chapter of the Dhammapada.

Google just shut down the last piece of Google Talk, killing XMPP. This means that people using standards-based open and interoperable chat systems can no longer talk to their friends who use Google’s proprietary and closed chat system, Hangouts. For example, people who use Pidgin on any of the thousands of free and open XMPP servers in the world cannot message Google users anymore.

Instead of working towards standardization, making sure that all chat systems from all vendors can talk to each other, each large company now has their own communications silo. Skype is not compatible with Hangouts is not compatible with Apple FaceTime is not compatible with WeChat is not compatible with WhatsApp. Even though all these systems perform mostly the same function, have roughly the same features and could be built using open, mutually compatible standards. Could even be built from the same source code.

But Google, Microsoft and Facebook make more money by preventing you from talking to your friends on other systems. They want to analyze both parts of a conversation, they want to control the sender and the receiver and read all the content. This is harder to do when you have a standardized, federated system, and even harder in the case of XMPP where users can employ message encryption with just a few clicks. Encryption that is not controlled by Microsoft or Facebook but by the users themselves.

What can you do against this?

Geting an XMPP JID would be the first step. You can register for an account on any public XMPP server (sometimes called Jabber servers, but Jabber is now a closed product by Cisco, adding insult to injury, while the XMPP standard remains open).

Then get an XMPP client, for example Pidgin for the desktop and Conversations for Android. Set up your account and log in. People can now invite you to their XMPP contacts and you can start chatting.

If you want message encryption, make sure to enable OTR. There are many tutorials on this, I’ll just link to a random one I found.

What if you don’t do this? Then we’ll end up in a world with more and more communication silos, where people find it harder and harder to talk to each other, and huge multinational companies with very bad privacy policies will control and record more and more of our communication. Because these closed platforms create inconvenience for anyone not inside those closed platforms, group pressure will then pull everyone towards such closed platforms, until a dangerous oligopoly emerges. This latest move by Google is one more step in this direction.

Like I guessed about two years ago, Google are now trying to undermine the ad blocking market by releasing their own ad blocker, which will of course not block ads served by Google. It will probably also not block other privacy invasions or tracking systems that would benefit Google or its customers. Since Google is the world’s largest advertisement company, that’s quite a few.

This is likely just the first step of several that they might take while abusing their browser dominance. Watch carefully as things get worse the higher Chrome’s market share climbs.

You can still use an independent web browser, but who knows for how long? The effects I described in that old article linked above might lead to content no longer working correctly on anything but Google Chrome, and by that time Google’s control of what you can and cannot see, and also of how much of your privacy you are forced to surrender, will be total.

Monks, huh? Good-for-nothing social parasites, locked up in their monasteries, cooking bland veggie food and making worthless mandalas all day long. Yeah, if you look at it from the outside, sure. But a nun’s or monk’s qualities are mostly internal, they automatically accumulate some wisdom and compassion, unless they’re bad at their job, in which case they should probably quit and move back to the real world.

But monks and nuns are also foolish and deluded, just like everyone else. They simply have a more professional and focused way of dealing with it. You don’t become automatically enlightened just because you wear a black or saffron robe, my friend, and Buddhist suttas are full of stories of stupid or silly monks who just didn’t get it. Usually there is one other person in those stories who did get it, and sometimes they make fun of the unwise one. Other times the idiot him or herself realizes they’re being thick.

All this goes to show that the position of nun or monk is in no way special. Some Buddhist sects abhor hierarchy because it creates artificial superiority between beings where there is none. In the same vein, Buddhism has always been both for laypeople and for monastics. Both can ultimately achieve the same, and there are examples of laypeople who have achieved enlightenment, such as Layman Pang.

Well, okay, we didn’t cover that entire length just in the Alps, but I needed a catchy title. If you want the short version: there is nothing to say here, and that’s the most significant thing I can tell you about electric driving in Europe today.